Broken Watch
by escapeasy
Summary: Post-R2, Yaoi, SPOILERS / Everybody needs reasons to keep living. Even if those reasons are somewhat insane. / Jeremiah/Suzaku, implied Lelouch/Suzaku.


So this happened… (Unofficial Lelouch-birthday fic?)

 **SPOILERS** FOR THE END OF R2 and consenting maso!Suzaku being kinky.

* * *

Broken Watch

It's no coincidence that today is Lelouch's birthday.

Empress Nunnally vi Britannia might like to take the time to officially remember the brother she lost, in more ways than one, but the world isn't so sentimental— _forgiving_ , as they shouldn't be. Little over a year later and everybody is still licking their wounds; stitching themselves together with the Demon King's blood as their thread and Zero's sword their needle.

Just as His Majesty had more than hoped – he calculated.

While December fifth is the day a demon was born, it's his death that sits on the tips of tongues. Those that (are perhaps privileged to) mourn the teenage tyrant are few and far between but it was deemed in poor taste to celebrate his death – to celebrate the death of anyone. If only because of Her Majesty Nunnally's insistence. Instead the end of a violent age is what is honored on his death day; a day of mourning all that were lost in the war and what their sacrifices gained.

The irony twists especially tight around the wrists of another man the world (thought they) saw die: Knight of Zero, Suzaku Kururugi.

Bound, blind-folded and gagged. That's the way the new Zero spends the old Zero's birthday.

News feeds mutely shutter from the wall-mounted television screen which is the only source of light that flickers in the dark, sterile room (an unimportant, vacated and lonely chamber in the Britannian imperial palace) thanks to the thick, heavy maroon drapes safely obscuring the windows. Long shadows sway into white corners and contort the silhouettes of two men rocking on a disheveled bed. For one certain cyborg, the news laps at his clothed, black back as his single orange iris is trained on the taut, youthful body in his lap. His bare hands hooking spread legs up by their knees leaving helpless heels to hang the air.

All naked skin and tense muscles.

Hard nipples and leaking erection.

Zero's blue skin is abandoned on the floor like a tossed wrapper while the prize inside is laid bare like it probably shouldn't be. Kururugi's hands are tied to the top of the steel frame at the head of the bed by Zero's black leather belt. A creamy almond linen handkerchief is firmly folded and knotted over his eyes and a long, white cravat is uncaringly stuffed in his throat, overflowing past his lips to his chin as it absorbs scandalous sounds. The cloth is an effective sponge even if it doesn't completely silence him as he stretches around Jeremiah's bare, hard flesh. Kururugi garbles on moans that spiral up his curving spine from the callous hardness shoving into him in a strong and resilient rhythm, crutched on the deep onslaught by metal and leather.

Up and down.

Out and in.

Shameless, but not proud.

Kururugi is tight. Hot. Silken. Gripping. The older man distantly muses that it shouldn't be surprising Kururugi is supple and melting on the inside – not because, despite everything, he is a human being but because this little Russian nesting doll has always been nothing but a bleeding heart at his center. Not always hard on the outside, but always soft on the inside. Maybe it's just a surprise that such wantonness would – or _could_ – also burn at the center.

Constricting and sucking like searing satin laces that pull Jeremiah deeply in every time, pearls of perspiration gather along his brow as he thrusts upward into a body that shouldn't accept him as easily or keenly as it does. He watches his sturdy length disappear and reappear through the flexing ring, shaking the brunet's weepy, neglected arousal between his muscular thighs, before checking that half-obscured face. Their clandestine fucking is a sweaty scarlet stain on Kururugi's cheeks just as it's a creeping warning on his tightly restrained hands, but it's the labored breathing flouncing his chest that captures the Britannian's attention. Jeremiah feels the non-mechanical parts of his body falter, watching and hearing the strenuous breathing through a perhaps too-effective gag, wondering if it's possible for the former White Reaper to suffocate like this.

(The thought of testing the supernatural command Lelouch embedded into Kururugi's being drifts closer to Jeremiah's hips than it should.)

He pulls the moist, long cloth out of Kururugi's mouth.

Unleashing pants that spill out in unexpected heaps, but the undead man doesn't speak. Wine-dipped fingers curling.

If Kururugi is afraid of being overheard, he'll just have try harder to stifle himself. Maybe he should've opted to choke on Jeremiah's thrusting erection instead. (Or, if he wants so badly to perish he'll have to find some other means.) And maybe the former Royal Guard wouldn't mind seeing the boy's lip bead red with bitten cries.

Jeremiah sheds his black blazer and loosens his burnt orange tie, surrendering slightly to the heat simmering under his skin, before slinging the brunet's legs over his white-clad, gray-vested shoulders and lifts up to his knees with lunging hips—

And there it is.

A pleased sound that Kururugi strangles in his nose before it falls to jumble in his chest as the blue-haired man resumes taking him again, open and hungry just as he has been. Jeremiah bites an unintentional curse as he holds a smaller body in his steely grip, staring at the improperly masked face trying to drown in this moment. Lips are pressing white against stubborn moans just like his knuckles studded across hands that are already turning too plumb as he's braced against the silver bed frame by his shoulders and bent neck. The metal shrieks louder and louder the more Jeremiah moves, hands clenched on narrow hips below the shifting sea of muscle of Kururugi's abdomen. The Britannian's eye narrows, his own breath growing harsh in his own ears a his cock rushes in and out of a pulsing swamp as even jostling legs try to clamp over his shoulders.

Bony knees crash against his head instead.

Jeremiah wrenches himself out and effortlessly flips the former eleven over and down onto his knees and then plunges his thirsty erection back into this infinite well. The belt anchoring Kururugi's wrists to the bar isn't pliant, making his arms twist instead with an anguished sound stemming from his lips—

Sliced with the sharp, decisive cleave of Jeremiah's hips, mixing pleasure with a bitter zest of pain that Kururugi eats with neediness swallowing the hardness reaching deeper than it did before. All the way in to the ramming hilt of his hips cushioned by round cheeks. The farmer's plowing body reaps his own pleasure hard and fast to the chopping moans leaping in Kururugi's chest, feeling and hearing the body in front of him nearing its peak as well. The younger man's back carves into a solid bow to catch all the rough pleasure consuming him, numbness purpling his hands and fingers as his crossed arms strain and pull against the belt. A stray thought twitches in Jeremiah's fingers to grab and jerk the other man's shaft he's been ignoring, but he realizes he's been ignoring it for a reason. So his grip on hips tightens as he throws his own hips harder still, just _fucking_ the bottled blood right out of the former number.

Suzaku Kururugi doesn't want sympathy.

Or pity.

Or any soft amenities that don't fit inside his new mask.

The blinded boy falls off his peak first, a hard and shuddering ripple that drags a full curse from Jeremiah's throat as it clenches around his length in a collapsing tunnel, crashing an unexpected jolt through his body. The cyborg hisses and his fingers dig into toned flesh in the hard bucking of his hips as an end consumes both men, carelessly shoving a deflating, bound body against the steamed metal bed frame. Kururugi is a panting, an empty sleeve of skin, head resting in the hammock of his arms as Jeremiah slides down pleasure in thick, wadding waves spilling into the warm body bent in front of him. His shirt is clinging to his sweaty back, moisture pooling at the base of his spine as he braces himself on a steel bar, staring down at the loose, hanging boy connected to him for only as long as he recaptures his breath.

Jeremiah apathetically pulls out in a rough motion that sharpens an off-guarded sound in Kururugi's throat. He leaves the bound boy on the bed as he casually returns himself back into his slacks and pulls on his jacket, reaching with care only to pluck the handkerchief from a damp, listless head. As it unfurls the glittering brand of Jeremiah's initials is revealed stitched in gold on one corner.

Kururugi remains a slumped mass as Jeremiah calmly straightens his fitted black (mourning) suit, facing away from the despairing debauchery and towards the tv. A drying sheen of sweat sparkles in the shifting light on the brunet's back while the older man's _leaving_ oozes out of him onto the rumpled blankets. Jeremiah is tucking the wrinkled cloth into his interior breast pocket when Kururugi eventually lifts himself up to fiddle at the leather more than chafing his wrists, freeing himself from Zero's tether and limply falling backwards on the bed with a metal buckle hitting the floor in a stark _clink_.

A lone, golden eye observes a brief report of the Britannian Empress' meeting with the European Union last week, an obedient Prime Minister Schneizel in tow.

"Have you seen him?" Kururugi's dusty voice suddenly creaks, piercing their staunch silence.

"Whom?" Jeremiah's gaze stays on the TV.

"Who else?"

The Britannian pins his suspicious eye over his shoulder at the other man.

" _His Majesty_ ," the old solider sneers the epithet, though not quite sharp enough to shear.

"…What are you blathering?" Jeremiah perplexedly asks after a brief pause, turning halfway to stare at the deflated, naked man on the bed.

"I haven't seen C.C. since then."

"Should you?"

Kururugi points his right finger against his forehead like a gun, drawing a swooping V across it before his finger slices right off his skin and straight into the air at his left.

His wrist is splotched with bruises bleeding just under the veil of his pale skin.

"You think he faked it," the once shamed Orange accurately assumes with light condescension carrying his voice.

"That's what he does." Kururugi's voice is barren like a winter wind as his arm swings back to his right with a flourish reminiscent of the original Zero, falling flatly at his side like a broken wing. "He's a liar."

Jeremiah doesn't hide his judgmental stare at the glaring present tense that brazenly fires from cold lips – not that the brunet sees it.

His Majesty Lelouch still alive?

The exiled prince, the admired terrorist, the conquering demon – at the core there was always a _survivor_. Jeremiah can understand the appeal, but such a delusion…

"You saw his body before it was buried."

"Buried. Not cremated," Kururugi adamantly argues.

… _That's_ how it is, isn't it?

"If he is a wandering ghost," Jeremiah evenly says, noticing his surfacing finger bruises on a knee that bends and points upward, "he hasn't visited me."

"Of course," Kururugi derisively scoffs. "Like you would tell me even if he did."

It's _easier_ to hate Lelouch vi Britannia than it is to grieve him.

To loath the masterful magician who had one last trick, one last laugh, than rue the young man who was baptized and drowned in blood.

Because if Kururugi can grieve, he might forgive.

And then the festering anger will congeal into guilt that will sink him like a stone in water at hurting someone once precious to him – more than once, more than just slaying Lelouch as penance for overflowing sins.

And then Lelouch's blood will stain Kururugi's hands (just like his father's had.)

The once White knight finally animates his lifeless body in an offhanded roll over one side of the bed, landing on his bare feet like a cat despite how fatigued he seems. Jeremiah's single eye narrows as the Japanese gent pads by to retrieve Zero's shell from the floor at the foot of the bed—

Only to become caged in Jeremiah's grip once again, chest shoved on top of the nearby wooden desk—

Wrists captured at the base of his spine with one hand—

While another anchors over his neck, pinning his miswired brain beside the mask he placed with care, unlike with the rest of himself—

Forced to stare at Zero's severed skull.

"You seem so certain of it all yourself, why bother asking?" Jeremiah's voice boils out of him more hotly than he expects—

Kururugi rumbles with quiet _cackles,_ "You wanted this, didn't you? All those years ago." At Jeremiah's tense silence, Kururugi's lips sardonically curl nearly _too much like the man he replaced_. "When you had me in custody for Clovis' murder. Collared and bound. But maybe you like it better this way. A _Zero_ you can actually punish—"

Jeremiah roughly fists his hand in a messy brown mane, making the attached man wince.

"Claims the turncoat who built a life on betrayals?" Jeremiah venomously sneers (Lancelot, indeed.) "This is all you've ever wanted." Which "this" he leaves up to Kururugi to decide. But it's not as though this tryst was Jeremiah's idea.

Wounds to his _orange_ pride have long ago healed. Any animosity that once seethed in Jeremiah's blood after Zero disgraced him had already cooled long before now. All of that… it's rather trivial now.

There is no anger over _Zero Requiem_ , either.

Only, perhaps, remorse that it ever had to come to that. Jeremiah would've _gladly_ served an Emperor Lelouch into a new age – as he did – until his last breath, but in the end there's a lingering regret that he couldn't be the shield for His Majesty Lelouch as he wished he had for Lady Marianne. A regret at the waste of life—

Jeremiah's jaw clenches.

So… maybe the Japanese _imposter_ is a little right, after all.

But even a broken clock—or _pocket watch_ is right twice a day.

"Is this just another order from your _Master_?" Kururugi scathingly spits.

Not at all.

Jeremiah would say it's only a matter of coincidence that he's here in Pendragon, the palace, but there's just no such thing – not when it comes to anything connected to Lelouch, near or far. Jeremiah is a special guest of Empress Nunnally who had learned of the rather tangled history he has with her family. They do not communicate much at all, but she does seem to greatly favor his oranges over any other grove in the nation.

In the end maybe it's fitting that _Jeremiah_ is the only eligible _cock_ that can peek under Zero's cape. ( _Schneizel_ is little more than a drone, unable to deny, although it seems unlikely he'd obey Kururugi without _Zero's_ face. Also seems unlikely that Kururugi would use someone without real consent.)

Jeremiah Gottwald is the man that failed to protect Lady Marianne.

That offered Kururugi as a sacrifice.

Fell to ruin thanks to Zero.

Saved by Lelouch.

The man that let Kururugi sacrifice Lelouch as Zero through loyalty sprouted by Lady Marianne.

(And maybe Kururugi likes being fucked by so many ugly ironies at once.)

"Tell me, _Eleven_ , _Seven_ , _Zero_ , whoever you are," Jeremiah frostily murmurs, rather enjoying how the knives of numbers carve Kururugi's _bleeding heart_ , "just exactly who does your body ache for right now? Who do you really wish could be inside you?" The answer to that question is so painfully obvious that it almost hurts to even ask.

Almost.

With Emperor Lelouch and Princess Euphemia, maybe Kururugi (the _phoenix_ ) is just doomed to be a star-crossed lover forever noosed from the heavens he wishes so desperately to join.

Instead the wrong people depart.

Kururugi makes a _real_ attempt to shove Jeremiah away, but the Britannian's _upgrades_ aren't just for show. He effortlessly restrains the – stripped, vulnerable – naked man against the surface of the desk next to his inherited mask.

Sympathy, empathy, isn't soft in Jeremiah's grip or his chest—

Eye falling on the bruises circling wrists and sponged on hips – blue like Zero's suit.

That's right. No matter how scarred, bruised or injured the boy is underneath Zero's veneer, it will never show.

(And maybe that's a final, vengeful nail in the coffin from Lelouch.)

—But maybe there's a small pity that finally frays at his fingers.

Kururugi is… a complicated individual. And despite everything, he's still little more than a _child_.

Jeremiah clips the wings of a small sigh that sneaks out of his chest as he releases the younger man, watching him push himself up on the desk with a hunched back and tiredly trembling arms.

The Zero replacement, of course, doesn't answer Jeremiah's question.

(What would Kururugi even do if His Majesty Lelouch did just suddenly appear one day?)

But the old Orange lets it be.

Maybe Kururugi is only clinging to what's familiar.

Maybe he doesn't even know of any other way to _live_.

"Don't forget your place," is all Jeremiah perfunctorily says. A curt reminder of just what it is that the Knight had promised.

…Could Lelouch still be alive?

Doubtful, but…

He wasn't dubbed the _Man of Miracles_ for no reason, was he?


End file.
